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Saturday, November 30, 2013

This post is late. Not only in that it’s 9:59PM as I
sit down to write it but in that what are you truly grateful for and thankful
for sense I didn’t really have a post for that in that in some ways I feel
blessed beyond measure and in others I feel like God is dumping the good on it
to make up for some stuff that’s not so cool that I got stuck with. But let’s
be positive. What I’m truly grateful for in my life right now is my recovery.
And my recovery is three fold. I’ll break it down.

I am a survivor of childhood sex abuse. It was
severe and stranger than fiction and my mother and stepfather while they know
some of the details I choose not to share most of it with them. In fact I’ve
shared more about the abuse and my recovery from it on this blog than I have
anywhere else save my therapist’s office. It took years to do the work and it
wasn’t easy. Confronting those particular demons dredges up all kinds of dark
and powerless feelings. And I was always supposed to be gentle with myself, but
my mom and dad(John, NOT the predator(s)) didn’t always make it easy.

Coming out of one of those sessions I almost always
felt raw and vulnerable and they almost were always cranky or mad at someone
else and I became a convenient target. When I tried to put my boundaries in
place with them they made it very difficult. While in many ways they are
supportive, i.e. letting me live in their house rent free and supplementing my
grocery bills while I pursue my creative endeavors, they have no true
comprehension of just how damaging their carelessness or anger can be.

In the long run the lesson I’ve learned in coping
and dealing with them is that they don’t understand
the first bit about what I’m going through and it’s best if I tell them nothing
of my recovery process. They fail every time I expect them to act a certain
e.g. they zig when I fully expect them to zag.

As it is, I have more interest in pouring my heart
and soul into my work than into a romantic relationship. I like the love
stories where I can control them. On paper. LOL. But the nightmares have for
the most part have stopped. Although last night I had one so vivid I had to
wake myself up several times to make sure I wasn’t being raped again.

So, I’m thankful for the demons that have haunted me
in that arena have receded for the most part to the background and only seem to
bother me when I’m especially tired, or have faced an especially trying day the
parent units.

Secondly, but I think of most importance to me, is
my mental health recovery in regards to my bipolar diagnosis. If I’m honest
with myself high school was when the symptoms started, first with the
depression, then with the mania. In college the lack of sleep started and the
night terrors were horrendous. Over the next five or six years I cycled like
clockwork, but I didn’t really start to lose my grip until I was 23. I was
sleeping an hour a day. Every little thing set me off. And said awful things to
the person who was in the thick of it with me: Missy.

My writing suffered as a result to the point I wasn’t
writing anything. And when I was it was crap. Flat. No real life in it. I didn’t
write on my own anymore. As good and as great as it was to work with Missy I
had effectively crippled myself to only writing with someone. As my recovery progressed I realized my mojo had left
me. And in my desperation to get well I had turned my back on the one thing
that brought me more joy than anything else. Writing. And it was Missy who
noticed an ad for a contest in 2003, NaNoWriMo 50,000 word book in 30 days.

I took the plunge and HANDWROTE the novel. It took
me until the beginning of February to do it but I did it. And boy did my hand
ache when it was all said and done with. Was it a great book? No. Was it going
to win any awards? Certainly not. But it proved to me that I could do it.

In 2004 Missy and wrote, directed, and produced a
movie, one too messed up to be edited. Half our cast were divas the other half
couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there because of it.

These steps among others helped in my healing
process. And then, a breakthrough. In 2011 my sleep cycle righted itself. I
scored three publication contracts and won an award. I kept writing. I kept
getting better. I kept racking up contracts and in 2012 I had my first Amazon
Bestseller in GLADIATOR: The Gladiator Chronicles. More awards followed. In
2013 I appeared the front of the city newspaper and my screenplay adaptation of
my bestselling Bounty Hunter won the Best SciFi Screenplay Award at Fright
Night. More than that I graduated from therapy to case management. I have been
asked to present my recovery to the board of directors. I find that to be an
incredible honor, and even when my memoir based on this blog, and Gemini’s War
became bestsellers on Amazon I find that it is what I am most grateful for. My
recovery. Because without my recovery I would have none of the success that I
have now.

I am fond of saying I wrote my way back from the
brink of madness. But it was with the help of Anita, Rose, Ronnie, and Missy
and Pam that I can sit still long enough to enjoy a television show, a movie, a
book, and even yes the ability to sit down and write any of these is due in no
small part to the roles these people played in my life over the last twelve
years. It was a long road. But somehow I made it back to tell everyone else who
may be at different points in their road to recovery that it can be done.
Because if I can do anyone can. And that is truly what I am most thankful for
this year.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

On dreary, icy cold days like today and the tired
creakiness is just so bone deep all you want to do is sleep. For me the reasons
are many that I sleep on days like today. My mood disorder is linked to the
weather at times. I’ve been extraordinarily happy these last few days. When an
actor or actress you admire says they desire to play a part in your work you’re
trying your damndest to the television screen it makes for a delightful day.
They give you a name of someone they want you to send the treatment and pilot
to makes for a joyous day. I had one of those days yesterday for BELLA MORTE.
But if you want to read about it just follow the hyperlinked Bella Morte and
see where (hopefully) I’m starting to get a buzz going for the work. Another
actor, Jon Lindstrom, favorite a tweet of mine which said I thought he would
make a perfect Kravitz. So huge strides. An agent discovering me? Not exactly.
Still waiting to hear back from two others with the treatment and pilot.

No, what has me happy today is the fact I’ve lost 10
pounds! Down from 302 to 292! The steps, the fruit, the vegetables, the meals.
All started around Halloween means in a month’s time I’ve lost 10lbs.! The
holidays always prove to me to be the hardest so Thanksgiving, I know the
British don’t celebrate this holiday and I wonder what my ancestors on my
father’s mother’s side think of all of this really think of it. Full blood
Apache my great grandmother was and my great grandmother on my mother’s father’s
side was biracial. Part Cherokee, part African American.

But boy do my modern day relatives cook up a feast
on my mother’s side. How can I say this politely? A friend of mine, his family
plans fell through, I won’t give names and I won’t give details because well, this
blog is essentially about me and my trials and triumphs. I figured if I asked
my mother if he and his wife and daughter could come she shocked me and said no
because my Aunt Debbie’s kids were coming. This angered me to no end. I wanted
to eat to it. So instead I said I would make dinner for him and his family at
home. She immediately asked sarcastically who’s going to pay for it? I scoffed
there was an extra turkey in the freezer that would feed four just fine. Missy
was making me some of her grandmother’s cornbread dressing with chicken livers.
And I could get green beans and a pumpkin pie and cool whip with my EBT card.

The long and short of it, I invited him, he had
others volunteer faster and I’m making dinner for my friend whose daughter has
an extreme form of autism that doesn’t really allow them to celebrate the
holidays like everyone else. And by only making three things with one dessert
and one cocktail (white zinfandel and sprite zero) I keep the caloric splurge
to a minimum.

Besides, if truth be told big family events bother
me and crank my anxiety levels up to sky high levels. And then what do I do? I
do what my mother did after our conversation about Thanksgiving I’d grab a bag
of chili cheese fritos and down the puppy to its crumbs.

I simply went to my room and wrote. I had a word
count to get and I simply didn’t have time for her hypocritical bullshit. I
understand my aunt almost died and it has freaked my mother out in a big way.
It freaked me out. It gave me what many would say was a ‘coming to Jesus’
moment. Where my aunt was (open heart surgery, her kidneys shutting down, her
coming thisclose to death) was where my habits were taking me. I didn’t want to
be on that path anymore. I think of where I want to be and that’s what I’m
going to do. I couldn’t continue eating late at night. Snacking and sneaking
and grazing and pigging out to the point of sickness.

My mom’s not there yet. And I suspect she has her
own mood disorder issues as both my sister Sara and I have bipolar disorder,
and Brandy deals with depression. The only common like dna wise that we have is
my mother. My mood disorder isn’t her ‘fault’ it isn’t anyone’s fault, but
there’s a lot of anger in me. I feel it stir every time I write an emotional
scene in a book or screenplay, or the teleplay I wrote for Nashville based on
the book I’m writing.

I’ve stripped the excuses away. Yeah, I had a crazy,
dysfunctional childhood, and mom and dad and Jerry are a good part of that. But
the point is, and my mom likes to think she knows me (she doesn’t) and she
thinks she knows my mood disorder (she doesn’t have the first clue) and she
tries to command me not to face those issues, not feel them. But the reality
is, if the weight is going to stay off I’m going to have to face those emotions
that I’ve covered up. The pain, the anger, the anguish, the fear, the rage, it’s
all to going to come to the surface eventually, I just pray for the strength
not to eat to it.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Here I am 25K+ from my goal on NaNoWriMo. For those
who read this blog don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. And I’ll
be honest Daniel, you don’t know me, and the reality is will never know me, by
that’s not what this blog has ever been about so I’m going to talk about my
current state of mind and my mind’s current state is this. It is exhausted.

Let me explain. NaNo is 50K in one month. However, I
am attempting 70K overall. I’ve never done that before. Ever. The furthest I’ve
gotten is 60K and that was after trying to get out of it, several times. It
lead to my first advance, which I gave back because they wanted to strip my
voice out of the manuscript.

Don’t get me wrong they were nice people and it’s a
fabulous indie publishing house but it wasn’t the kind of fit I was looking
for. It meant turning down a 500 dollar advance. Which in this world was very
hard to do.

But as I said it’s a year later and I know 70K is
within my grasp but I’m very, very tired.
When I tell my parents I’m toast after a day’s work they think I’m nuts. Point
is after all the tweeting, FBing, and blogging one should be sick to death of
even being on line, yet, it’s part of the daily grind.

Now, I love writing. Penning tales is kind of my
thing. I feel like something’s wrong if I’m not writing. Like maybe I’m fidgety
and my skin starts to jump. I’m restless and without direction. I wonder if it’s
like that for other artists, that is you’re not creating you feel like perhaps
something is just off.

Which brings me to the flipside of that, the
exhaustion. My parents are tolerant of my pursuit of my creative endeavors. In
my dad’s eyes my mother is a saint. And to some degree she is. But no one is
perfect.

Especially her or me. Dad is pointed in his assessment of this. He
says living at home bothers me more than it bothers them. Of course it does. I
spend two thirds of my time in that room. Partially because it’s conducive to
writing and partially because it protects me from whatever particular mood they’re
in that day.

Back to #NaNo. I struggled in the beginning. I
thought, how am I going to make it to 50K? And then I realized what was
blocking me. I had never written an EPIC before. A book with varying
viewpoints. Flashback fully realized. And characters, even the bad ones, could
have humanizing qualities. Innocents turned bad due to circumstances beyond
their control. Heroes who are inherently flawed making them more anti-hero than
hero. And with only one true heroic character, the heroine, I suddenly realized
somewhere between 5K-15K that this book could go the full 70K distance. Which
truth be told was still a little too short for NY but it just might wiggle
through if it was good enough.

What makes things so awesome is I have my own
personal cheerleader in someone I will not mention because I don’t know how
they feel about me using their name. Of course there’s a part of me that doesn’t
want me to share her. She simply too awesome.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

I want to share something with you and those who
read this blog. The handful who’ve graced me with their readership know that my
recent trajectory is nothing short of mind boggling. I’ve been writing since I
was five. Been watching t.v. and going to the movies before then. One of my
first memories is being in a let down hatchback of a Pinto. Yes. I said
hatchback and Pinto. And my mom, dad, sister Brandy and I were at the drive-in.
And yes, I realize I said drive-in. The movie we were seeing was The Empire
Strikes Back. I can’t remember if I made it through the whole movie since that
was 78 and that would make 3 at the time. But the experience I remember distinctly.

The speaker you hung on the window. The warm night
air. The way you had to walk all the way
back to the concession stand. The stickiness of the floor. Honestly one
shouldn’t probably eat anything that
came out of that place. Every now and again we had the money for it but
ultimately we had large paper bags and this was before the advent of microwave
popcorn. We popped our own popcorn. When I got older my aunt and uncle did
this, brought a cooler of cokes and lawn chairs and we sat outside the car and
watched the movies that way. It was a cool and special way to go to the movies.

Growing into adulthood I found I wanted to be a part
of the magic. I wanted to write movies. But being in the middle of nowhere when
it came film (I live in KY) and being part of a blue collar family I didn’t
know anything beyond NYU and USC andUCLA film school. And the competition for those scholarships it seemed
was way out of my league and my parents didn’t have the money to send me
anywhere. I went on a partial scholarship to a theatre arts program school
where the focus was on acting. My mental health problems were already raring
their ugly little heads so I dropped out after the first year.

After a brush with cult called Amway and bouncing
around to several nothing jobs, I began to write. Not particularly well. But I
played in my sandbox alone, playing around with the kinds of stories I wanted
to tell. No one told mewhat I was doing
was right or wrong. I was pretty much allowed to develop on my own. Reading
books, going to films of all kinds from Batman to Muriel’s Wedding.

For the longest time I resisted moving out of my
family’s house, funny, right? I’d been on my own, living with a boyfriend and
his problematic family. I loved him very much, but I couldn’t handle being cut
off from everything I’d ever known, and after 5 months in New Mexico I moved
back to Kentucky.

My voice was allowed to develop freely. And when I
met Missy she approached me about writing a romance novel together. I, in my
arrogance and ignorance told her sure let’s write a romance novel for the
money. She loved the romance genre, and what I found was that love stories are
hard to craft. Especially ones that demand happily ever afters where I had a
penchant for killing off one or both of the lovebirds. Nicholas Sparks likes to
blather and blither on that he writes love tragedy. The reality is he writes
women’s fiction. Where romances don’t always end happily ever after. Honestly,
I read how he treated a female writer for even suggesting this and I think he
was just being a jerk.

That being said, my twenties were filled with
learning the art of the pitch, which I hate to brag but I’m really good at it.
And co-writing scripts and shooting short films. Some of which I would never
show the light of day. But here’s the thing, my voice was developing over that
time. And in my early thirties I exercised my novel writing muscle. I needed a
break, and Lea Schizas of MuseItUp Publishing gave it to me for my romantic
suspense short novel, Another Way to Die. (Yes, I know, I stole the title from
Quantum of Solace’s Bond Theme. Bad Amy.) And proceeded to go through the most
grueling edit ever. I now have five books with them. Each better than the last.
I was 35. It was 2011. I am now 38, and have books spread out across three
other small presses.

Then last fall I got the itch. I wanted to write a
screenplay again. Just to see if I’d gotten any better. I hadn’t gone near a
screenplay in 5 years. They say it’s a young person’s game, but at 38 Missy and
I, women, no less, scored our first win ever with Bounty Hunter. This past
spring Missy and I watched Kevin’s Burn In Hell tour. She asked me if I wanted
to start down that path again. Why not? What did we have to lose?

In the span of 4 months I penned two short novels
and co-wrote two screenplays. Since as you may have noticed I penned a pilot
and developed a treatment. Wrote another short novel and now I’m working
furiously towards a 70K length novel. My first one that I can actually take to
agents.

For what it’s worth I know drive-in’s are dying.
That New York will look vastly different on the publishing landscape, but I
already have found an agent to submit to quite by accident. But first to finish
that book, Bella Morte.

Amy Unplugged

Letters:the Memoir

From: The Author, To: Daniel Craig

Dear Readers,

Daniel Craig is my favorite actor. His work and acting style and how he carries himself professionally and personally inspire me greatly. Or more simply put by Kevin Smith about The Book Of Mormon Musical, he is my Spirit Animal. This blog is my memoirs as told to a silent witness of my choosing, Daniel. And of course all of you who visit daily to see me battle bipolar disorder, my dysfunctional family, or my personal demons. Or better, on my good days thanking those who have truly been my guardian angels. I thank you all who come and bear silent witness or sometimes leave a comment or two. Perhaps one day I will meet my hero, and get to thank him in person.